Book review: Charles J. Whalen (ed), Financial Instability and Economic Security after the Great Recession (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA 2011) 240 pp

Certain economists, relegated to the margins of academic debate, found a new audience following the crisis that broke out with the US real estate slump (second half of 2006) and took on a systemic dimension with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy (September 2008). Such periods of crisis lend fresh interest to analyses that break with the dominant trend of celebrating the virtues of the self-regulating market, insisting instead on the natural instability of economic systems. We can even add that the period running up to the crisis showed a clear imbalance, with a majority of research celebrating the advantages of free markets and praising their stability, while a small number of schools of thought and economists did not heed the siren song of laissez-faire. This fact explains the striking contrast between the magnitude of the damage caused by the crisis, and the failure of most economic theories to anticipate it or to propose a satisfactory explanation.